As I noted in a previous post, it is a crime under G.S. 14-454(b) "willfully and without authorization . . . [to] access[] . . . any computer." I posed a few scenarios in that earlier post, including one in which a judge tells a law clerk not to use the internet during business hours for non-work-related purposes, but the law clerk nonetheless looks at a sports web site during ACC basketball season. I asked if the law clerk had committed a crime, and suggested that the answer appears to be yes, much to the dismay of law clerks -- and other office workers -- everywhere. No state cases address this issue, but thanks to a blog post by Professor Orin Kerr, I recently came across a relevant federal case. (A federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1030, makes it a crime to "exceed authorized access" to a computer.) The case is United States v. Rodriguez, __ F.3d __ (11th Cir. Dec. 27, 2010), and the basic holding is that a Social Security Administration employee violated the federal unauthorized access statute when he looked up the Social Security records of some acquaintances for personal reasons, in violation of the Administration's policy about data access. The court rejected the defendant's argument that the statute only applies when a person makes criminal or fraudulent use of the information accessed. Rodriguez isn't quite analogous to the law clerk hypothetical, because it involves an employee accessing his employer's own database rather than an outside website. And [...]
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